The most crucial challenge in measures against cancer is the early detection of cancer. Particularly, early detection is important for cancers originating from the upper part of the large intestine since they cause only limited subjective symptoms and the medical condition may likely to be in its advanced stage by the time of discovery.
Traditional measures against large intestine cancer include screening by the fecal occult blood test, diagnosis by serum markers such as CEA or CA19-9, and diagnosis during a course of treatment. However, the positive rates of these methods are high only for advanced cancers and extremely low for early cancers, making accurate diagnosis difficult in their early stages.
Meanwhile, a biological diagnostic method using a cancer tissue-specific protein marker is suggested as a method allowing simple and reliable early diagnosis of malignancy. This method can be performed on a broad range of asymptomatic subjects since it does not require a large-scale facility and causes small burdens for the subject. For instance, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. H07-51065 discloses a usage of glycoprotein 39 as a tumor marker.
In addition, International Patent Application Publication No. WO/2004/018679 describes a technology regarding a cancer diagnostic kit using CENP-A. Sugata, N., et al., “Human CENP-H multimers colocalize with CENP-A and CENP-C at active centromere-kinetochore complexes,” Hum. Mol. Genet., vol. 9, no. 19, 2000, pp. 2919-2926 discloses the sequences of human CENP-H protein and its corresponding encoding nucleotide which correspond to SEQ ID No: 1 and SEQ ID No: 2 of the present application. Sugata et al. also discloses the biochemical characterization and the localization of CENP-H protein suggesting its role in cell cycle progression.
WO 03/104426 discloses CENP-E with additional background information relating to CENP-A, B, C, and D. Also, WO 03/104426 discloses a method to detect the abnormal amount of CENP-E protein in biopsied tissue for diagnosis of predisposition or actual clinical symptoms of cancer and the kits for detecting the presence of aberrant CENP-E protein expression.
However, cancer expression cannot be thoroughly verified by the technology described in the above JP-A-H7-51065 alone and a plurality of means must be used to ensure positive identifications.
Considering the above situation, the purpose of the present invention is to provide a further identification of a gene related to cancer expression and a diagnostic kit using the same.